The worms crawl in ...

Flipping a rock on the beach usually exposes a scramble of leggy crabs, heading for cover. When they've gone, if the substrate is wet, knots of worms rouse themselves and ooze or paddle away, more slowly.

Flatworms flow like melted butter, slowly, insensibly, but surely. They're the first to disappear. Note the two eyespots; they're watching me! The green ribbon is a worm, too.

Purple ribbon worms, Paranemertes peregrina, with their pale, creamy bellies, twist and turn, and gradually untangle themselves. It takes them a while to get out of sight. All of the snail shells, I think, are rented out by young hermit crabs.

The polychaetes move quickly; they hate the light. But they're long, so they take a while to entirely hide themselves.

Detail of the longest worm, showing the dot-and-hair extension on each paddle "foot". I don't remember seeing this before. I've saturated the red colour a bit, to make the hairs more visible.

A wormy post

Marine biologists count some 67,290 species of sea worms. (I checked each wormy page on this site and added them up.) And with millions - trillions - of individuals of the more prolific species, no wonder I find worms everywhere I look!

These were waiting out the low tide in the shelter of loose rocks on the Tyee Spit shore.

Shiny, multicoloured polychaete

I find these in the sand underneath the rocks, rarely on a rock or stone. They are shy and quick; mostly, if I look first at the rock, then at the sand, all I see is the last few segments of the worm squirming down underground. The only way to get a photo is to hold the camera ready and aimed, then lift the rock.

Their mouths vary depending on their diet, since the group includes predators, herbivores, filter feeders, scavengers, and parasites. Most have a pair of jaws and a pharynx that can be quickly turned inside out, allowing the worm to grab food and pull it into the mouth. (MESA)

There are 12,000 species of polychaetes. My encyclopedia lists 44 more or less free-living polychaetes in the Pacific Northwest.

A Mud nemertean, Paranemertes peregrina, and something green in a long tube.

Paranemertes, aka the Wandering ribbon worm, or the Restless worm, is easy to identify. It's a long ribbon, up to 25 cm. long, with a purple back and a creamy belly, usually found wandering alone, searching for its dinner: other worms, even worms much larger than itself.

On contact with nereid prey, P. peregrina pulls its head back and everts its light-colored proboscis, which wraps around the prey.  The prey is soon paralyzed, ...  P. peregrina then swallows the nereid.  After feeding it follows its own slime trail back to its burrow.  It eats about one prey worm per day ... (WallaWalla.edu)

I can't identify the green worm in the long tube, other than to guess that it's another ribbon worm.

A typical squirm of green ribbon worms, Emplectonema gracile. And a lone, brown flatworm.

The green ribbon worms are gregarious; where you find one, there are probably several more entwined with it. It eats barnacles, mostly the small acorn barnacles, slithering into cracks or the open mouth of the barnacle, using a poisonous needle-like stylet* to paralyze its prey. (That isn't going anywhere, anyways, but you never know.)

The flatworm also eats barnacles, and is so thin and flexible that it seems sometimes to be simply a brownish coating on the barnacle it's attacking.

In this photo, I've been puzzling over a perfect circle in the bottom of an empty barnacle shell. (Just above the flatworm.) It looks like the edge of one of those finger cots that I use instead of bandaids. A short worm, maybe? A mini Ouroboros?

*Photo of the stylet, here, at the bottom of the page, Row 1, on the right.

Spaghetti and cucumber, with ribbons. Under rocks.

What's purple and white and has an orange head? A worm, of course!

Purple ribbon worm, Micrura verrilli. The belly is all white.

Under rocks near the bottom of the intertidal zone, wherever the rock rests on mud or sand, there are worms. Many of them are these purple predators, hunting for other species of worms, which they catch like a frog catching flies, with a sticky proboscis. (Or a tongue, if it's a frog.)

The orange blob next to the worm is a sea cucumber, possibly a juvenile burrowing sea cucumber, Leptosynapta clarki. The dark lump at its head end is the mouth, with all its feeding tentacles retracted. These are detritus feeders, and grow up to about 6 inches long. This one was about 2 inches.

Another sea cucumber, under the next rock, and with a purple ribbon worm next to it. The worm is no danger to the cucumber, I think; it's 'way too big to swallow.

Spaghetti worm, with purple ribbon worm. And more worms; at the lower right, a polychaete lies in the mud; towards the centre right, there's a scale worm; below the spaghetti worm, there's a calcareous tubeworm. And in the clam shell, some sort of orange worm is encased in his sandy tube.

Next: the latest fashion in crab wear.

The secret beauty of carpet beetles

Sometimes the old and familiar takes you completely by surprise. Something you took for granted turned out to be completely wrong. Case in point . . .

I settled down this afternoon to practice taking macro photos again. For subjects, I had a small green worm, a hitchhiker in the eelgrass I collected for my hermits; and a carpet beetle.

The worm was fairly co-operative, given a tiny pebble to cling to for security. But there's not much to him; a long tube, green on the bottom, brown on top. A green spot at the head end. That's it.

Full length, stretched out, about 1 inch. A ribbon worm.

The carpet beetle was another story. After being incarcerated overnight (6 months in beetle years), he had one thought on his little mind: escape. I got dozens of shots of his retreating rear end. I gave him some grains of sugar, which did slow him down some, but only enough to gather energy for another run for freedom. Eventually I capitulated and put his glass plate over ice. Time slowed down. I got a couple of passable head shots.

Facing his captor. Defiant.

Even on a 1 mm. long beetle, coming in that close for a macro leaves a narrow band in focus. If I get the eyes, I get a blur for the body, and vice versa.

And at this distance, the flash works, but the beetle is in the shadow of the lens. I'll have to get a slave flash for better lighting.

Same photo, processed in a different program, (free Picasa), with sketch lines added. They give definition to the scales and facial features, but fade out the colours.

Now, here's the surprise. I've examined, fed, housed, cajoled, and photographed dozens of carpet beetles. I think they're pretty, with the orangey-brown, black, and white pattern. And they're available. They keep volunteering by sitting on my drapes or kitchen wall until I collect them. But other than the patterned back, the rest is done in a dingy battleship grey. Or at least, that's what I've seen.

But now I'm zooming in a bit closer, and the colours appear. In every photo from that distance, the legs show up green. The antennae are a reddish rust colour, the outer mouthparts green, the next ones in, white.

The camera overdoes the colours, so I desaturated them for the photo above; he's still wearing red, white, and green. I compared his colours to the worm's taken in the same spot. The worm is as I saw him, even at full saturation. Should I trust the camera? I'm not sure.

Now I'm sorry I released Mr. C. into the garden once the photo session was done. I need another carpet beetle! And a better light. What other glories have these critters been hiding all these years?

"I'm outta here!" (Says worm.)

I have been far too busy these last few weeks. My stack of unsorted photos grows every day; I may never catch up.

Here's a green worm I promised to post:

Unidentified; unidentifiable?

This was in the filter where I found the baby hermit crabs. It was barely a couple of mm. long, very green. It attracted my attention because it didn't move like most worms do, twisting and coiling and reversing direction every few seconds. This little guy went straight ahead, purposefully, to the edge of the drop of water, then along the side. Eventually, he began to push at the rim, distending it, stretching the drop out in the direction he wanted to go. I've seen flatworms do this, never other worms.

He had two distinct eyespots, and what looked like two smaller eyespots behind them. I think he has dark freckles along the sides, too.

All I can think of is a green ribbon worm, Emplectonema gracile, except that they grow to about 4 inches long; could this be a youngster? They have a lighter underside, which I couldn't see in this worm, as he was too small to be flipped over. They do have 10 to 20 eyespots on the head, fewer when they are tiny. (Description and photos, in Spanish.) They don't like the light; if this guy is E. gracile, I can see why he tried to push his way out of the drop of water under my lamp.

I put him in the tank; if he survives, I may see him again, grown up enough to identify properly.

A squirm of worms

What can be fat, flat, floppy, stiff, short, l o n g, armoured or nude, have no feet or many, wear a crown of tentacles or a bald pate, and be any colour of the rainbow? A worm, of course!

Every beach along the stretch of coast south of Campbell River had a full measure of worms. The wormholes, castings, and tubes we are accustomed to down here in the Fraser Delta, we passed by with a casual glance, and maybe one or two photos:

Worm tubes, Miracle Beach

But down in the lower intertidal zone, under mats of seaweeds, we found these:

Red-banded bamboo worm, Axiotella rubrocincta?

At first glance, I said, "A bamboo worm!". But now, examining the photo, I'm not sure. I don't see the bristles that the bamboo worm would have, but I can't find any other worm with those red bands. We have seen one like it, also out of its tube, at the bottom of Crescent Beach; its bristles are barely visible. So I'm sticking with Axiotella, for now.

Red calcareous tubeworm, Serpula columbiana.

There were many of these tubes cemented to the rocks. Many are just left-over empty tubes, but some have this red mouth. Underwater, the worm inside will extend its crown into a circular, brightly-coloured fan. When the tide goes out, it seals off the tube with a trap door, or operculum, which is all that we see here.

The worms usually get to about 2 1/2 inches long, but there are reports of 4 or 5 inch ones in the north of BC.

Orange ribbon worm, Tubulanus polymorphus.

These get up to 3 feet long. This one was not quite half that; maybe a bit over a foot, stretched out. Hard to tell; it wasn't co-operating with my idea of stretching it out in a straight line, and kept burrowing into the sand.

Ribbon worms are basically a digestive system in a tube. They capture food by extending a long proboscis (from the Greek; "front feed"), equipped with venom or glue.

Intertidal flatworm, with dwarf tubeworms.

Under a couple of rocks, we found clusters of these flatworms, which immediately slithered off in all directions. The two eyespots are visible here, at the widest point of the front end. The coiled pink tubes are dwarf calcareous tubeworms (Pileolaria spp.); the tubes are white and translucent, but the crowns of the worms inside are orange-red.

Another flatworm.

Two flatworms, a white ribbon worm, and several mud nemerteans, Paranemertes peregrina.

These purple and cream worms turned up at the edge of one of our flatworm group photos, somewhat blurry.  We hadn't noticed them, as we were chasing flatworms. Nor did I see the white ribbon worm until I was cropping the photo.

Another accidental mud nemertean, and a flathead clingfish, Gobiesox meandricus.

More on these fish, later. The worm here would be about 6 inches long. It may eventually reach 10 inches.

The mud nemertean is another ribbon worm. It can shorten itself up, becoming fatter and lumpy, or stretch out to a long, thin ribbon, with no segmentation.

Polychaetes. Blue-tinted polychaetes.

These are like the blood-red worms I have in my aquarium, but the ones we saw on Vancouver Island beaches were dark, and shimmered blue and green. These are quite small; the larger one is only a few inches long.

Three kinds of worms.

This pink ribbon worm was long. Really long. I pulled it gently out of almost liquid sand, and pulled and pulled; it kept coming. And by the time I'd reached the tail, the head was buried in sand a foot away. I never did get it all out at once. I'm not sure of the species; perhaps the rose ribbon worm, which grows to 6 feet long?

The cream-coloured worm behind it is not a ribbon; looking closely, I can see separate segments. I was so occupied with the pink one, that I never even noticed this one, nor the tiny section of red/pink polychaete at the upper left of the photo. (I can identify it as a polychaete by the bristles along the sides.)

What the ...?

This one has me completely befuddled. The front end has a crown of long, brown tentacles, then a segmented orange, "carrot" body, which enters a flexible tube coated with bits of shell and sand. Out the far end of the tube comes an orange, then green segmented worm, thinner and smoother than the head.

Here's the head end:

A bit of worm is visible inside the tube.

When I picked this up, it squirmed madly. The tail end tried to go south and the head went north, both ends looking for ground, the tube flopping around to meet the demands placed on it. I replaced it on the sand, and it lay quietly, half in and half out of its tube.

Here's a better view of the tentacles:

Tentacles like long, wavy, brown hair.

Our footing was precarious, and I had nothing solid to lean on. We gave up trying to get a good photo and covered the worm over with the seaweed.

Now I've gone through the encyclopedia and all my other books, searching for this. I can't find it. Does anyone recognize it?

*Update: Christopher Taylor says, in the comments, that it may be a terebellid, or what is commonly called a "spaghetti worm". I think he's right. None of the terebellids I've seen in my books or on the web look just like this, but the body structure matches: flexible tube, long tentacles at the mouth end, segmentation. I don't see gills, but they may be hidden, or not extended while the worm is out of the water.

The eelgrass dwellers

The tide was coming in.

(I remember how, when I was growing up on Vancouver Island's west coast, how our stories always began with the tide. It was high tide, it was low tide, the tide was going out ... For weather, we had seasons; rain every day, or fire season. What defined the state of our surroundings at the moment was the eternal tide.)

Last week on Boundary Bay, off Centennial Park, the tide was coming in. It was still far enough out that we could barely see the water beyond a great expanse of empty sand, so we didn't know that. I hurried straight out to the edge, hoping to get to where the seaweeds and crabs start. Too late; knee-deep in the water, I could see ahead where the green showed through the waves. Behind me, I could see that the crab shell I had placed just above the water line as a marker was now floating away. Time to head back.

All that first half-mile of the beach is lugworm and sea snail territory; we don't see much else, beyond an occasional crab molt or shattered clam.

The invasive Batillaria snails, and snail trails.

In the shallow pools near the edge, we noticed some strange brown blobs, floating like furry balloons on six-inch strings.

This one has several blobs. The dark patches are the shadows of the bubbles floating on the surface.

They were soft and mushy to touch, but held together when I pulled at them. They didn't break away from the stem. I dug a few up; they were on a strand of tiny eelgrass, and the roots went deep into the sand. But what were the blobs? Eelgrass is a flowering plant, were they flower heads? I thought they were supposed to be inconspicuous.

Blob, bubbles, and a barely visible eelgrass stem.

I dropped a few into my plastic bag to investigate at home. While I was at it, I collected a tangle of eelgrass roots from the dry sand.

The snails feed around these. There's one of the blobs in this knot, too.

Back home, I looked over my harvest. The blobs, spread out in water, turned out to be made of fine, brown hairs, baby-hair soft.

I had imagined that they would be populated by small critters; amphipods or snails, maybe. But there was nothing but the hair to be seen.

There was nothing like this in the Encyclopedia; I finally found it in Kozloff. The eelgrass is dwarf eelgrass, Zostera japonica, a small, introduced eelgrass, growing to about 8 inches tall; the leaves are half the width of native eelgrass blades. And the blobs ... I'll quote from Kozloff:

In certain places, especially during the summer months, the leaves of eelgrass become colonized by a variety of essentially microscopic plant organisms. Most obvious among these are the diatoms, which, if present in large numbers, constitute a furry, olive brown coating. If some of the diatoms present are of the chain-forming type, a good deal of the coating will seem to consist of fine filaments. Bacteria will also be plentiful, and once the biological ball starts to roll, detritus tends to become incorporated into the film.

The diatoms, bacteria, and detritus, as well as the decaying tissue of eelgrass leaves themselves, feed the mouths of many protozoa, microscopic worms ... and small crustacea.

It is still early in the season; the colonies were still free of detritus. Any other organisms were microscopic.

I turned my attention to the eelgrass roots. This is the larger, native eelgrass; the leaves are long, up to the length of my arm and more. The leaves grow out of a thick, brown rhizome that anchors it in the sand; small roots grow from the rhizome.

This rhizome, at least as it deteriorates, provides hollow tubes where small organisms can hide. Once, while I was nursing a broken flatworm back to health in a little bowl, I provided it with an inch of eelgrass rhizome for shelter. After a few days, it disappeared. I looked for it several times a day for three days, then it crawled out of the rhizome. So I put the eelgrass, roots and all, in water, and watched carefully.

There were amphipods, of course; there are always amphipods. And a couple of tiny snails. And a whole collection of worms:

Polychaete, (pronounced "Polly Keet"), after I'd liberated it into a tub of water and sand.

A ribbon worm. This is the head. It was blood-red under the light.

The ribbon worm entertained us for quite a while; it slid up to the surface along the rim of the bowl and spent the evening going round and round, occasionally lifting its head about an inch above the water line. Round and round and round; it only stopped when I dumped it in the tub outside. It was about 4 inches long, very red, very smooth, and featureless, except for the little triangular head.

Tube worm.

There were a couple of these tubes; this smaller one was about a inch long. I wouldn't have noticed it, except that it twitched occasionally.

The tube is decorated with sand grains cemented on.

The larger worm, about 3 inches long, kept extending its head (or maybe proboscis) and waving it around, in a searching pattern.

I looked it up in the Encyclopedia and on the web, but couldn't identify it.

And there was one more, not exactly worm-like, but I think it's a polychaete, going by the tufted "feet" along the sides:

Tiny worm, under the microscope. About 5 mm. long.

There are four appendages visible on the head end; two pale antenna-like things, and these two with a black spot at the tip, like a snail's eyes. My first photos didn't turn out, and when I went back to try again, I couldn't find it. It's somewhere in the tub; maybe someday I'll find it again, grown up a bit.